5 Signs You’re Working with a Great SEO Company
When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), many online marketing agencies will have you believe that it’s the toughest thing in the world to rank on the first page of Google. While it certainly requires a lot of genuine hard work to earn the trust and credibility of a major search engine and achieve the coveted first page ranking in organic listings, it can be done with effort, elbow grease, and help from a dedicated SEO agency. If you are searching for a trusted San Diego SEO company, here are 5 things to look for before signing any agreements.
1. Honesty
Assume you are an insurance broker selling auto insurance polices and the commission on a policy is $75. Now assume you are spending $2000/month on SEO services. At this rate, how many clients will you need to break even? The answer is 27. Now consider how many leads you will need in order to generate those 27 clients. If we assume that five percent of visitors will convert to clients, you’ll need right around 550 visitors per month to break even. A great SEO company cares about their clients. They are never in a hurry to close the deal unless they truly understand the marketing goals and revenue objectives of their prospective clients. The easiest way you can identify if you are working with a great SEO company is to see if they have taken the time to really understand your business model and determine whether SEO is the right fit and can provide an ROI that justifies the cost.
2. Clear Strategies and Exact Deliverables
A great SEO company will layout and explain their exact strategy for how they plan to get your website to the first page of Google in a way that’s easy for you to understand. A company that is confident in their strategies and SEO processes will also have a clear plan of action, list all deliverables, and explain how they track measurables.
3. Quality Content
Perhaps no other factor is more important in the SEO process than quality content. Google’s SEO Best Practices document states, “Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors…” There you have it. Right from the big G’s most important document on SEO. A great SEO company will do research to determine the exact type, nature, amount, and frequency of content needed to succeed and will tell you an SEO strategy that is void of high-quality content on a regular basis is certain to fail.
4. Backlink Building Transparency
The majority of SEO companies will include some sort of backlink building campaign in their search engine optimization services. High-quality backlinks are critical to making or breaking the prospects of ranking on the first page of Google, and a great SEO company will be transparent about the type and nature of the backlinks they will build. If a company just lists building backlinks as part of their services but fails to disclose what type of backlinks they will build, proceed with caution. It’s also important to know that building legitimate and highly relevant backlinks requires a lot of time, research, and outreach, hence the high price point of SEO services that include white hat backlinks. There are companies that specialize in building backlinks, and they charge as much as $3000 to $5000 per month, depending upon the number of backlinks. Keep in mind, however, no legitimate SEO company can guarantee an exact number of backlinks, only the work they put in.
5. Accountability Through Reporting
In the absence of transparency, clients start to make assumptions, and assumptions are always the perfect vehicle for misinformation and distrust. Great SEO companies will set the deliverables upfront and follow up with easy-to-understand reports on each deliverable. The reports should be used as a measuring tool to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign but should not be limited to just traffic, page views, and time spent on each page. Good reports should also identify areas of improvement and action steps for the future.
SEO is an important cog in the marketing wheel, and hopefully by now you’ve been able to gauge the quality of the company you’re working with. If you are with a great and trustworthy SEO firm, your business will thrive, but failure to select the right SEO company can be detrimental to your bottom line.